If I ever write a book about my conversion to anarcho-capitalism, I think this will be its title. Because this is easily the number one most-uttered response by those to whom I explain my belief that centralized government is immoral and must be abolished. What about the roads, indeed.
On the one hand, it is encouraging that most folks feel the most important service provided by government is transportation infrastructure — a service that is easily provided by private interests. On the other hand, it is unfortunate that so many people have come to rely on their government for something so simple. I should point out that no government anywhere has ever built a road (or anything else for that matter). Private companies build roads and bridges. Governments simply write the checks.
The recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis, as well as last year’s Boston tunnel incident, serve as evidence that as much as we might want to, government *cannot* be relied upon for the safety of these vital systems. That is not to say that private companies would be inherently more reliable (indeed the same contractors and engineers would likely be hired in both cases), but there are plenty of reasons to believe they would at least do a comparable job.
So who would pay these private companies? The obvious answer is those who use the roads and bridges that they build. Yes, that’s right, tolls would be collected from those who actually use these elements of transportation infrastructure. Rather than saddling the entire population with the cost of building and maintaining roads that they may never use, the cost would be born by those who actually use them. There was a time when many would object to the notion of tolls because the impractical means of collection would snarl traffic and impose an undue burden upon drivers. Even if that were true, it is no worse than the undue tax burden on non-drivers. And in reality, technology has reached a point where cars needn’t even slow down to pay a toll anymore, so this argument has been rendered moot.
Some would also argue that everyone benefits from the roads, so it is only fair that we all share the cost. By this same logic, my neighbors all benefit when I make improvements to my home (as it increases the property value of the entire neighborhood), so should I be able to send all of my neighbors a bill for the cost of these improvements? There are obviously direct and indirect benefits from virtually every action, but this doesn’t necessarily justify coercing others to finance those actions. Keep in mind that there was a long period in this country before there were any formal roads constructed, and the country still managed to prosper commercially. There is no question that transportation is at the heart of any good economy, however, should the cost of the infrastructure be shared by everyone, or just by those who directly benefit from its use?
Very good points. I would only add that tolls aren’t even the only way. A lot of free roads will exist much for the same reason that private free parking lots exists, i.e. in order to make a particular business readily accessible to customers and encourage their patronage. Consider all the private roads at Disney that are wide open to public use. In many cases these privately funded and yet free-to-use roads would bridge a lot of gaps, particularly in high density areas. Consider also advertising revenue from billboards that would go up as traffic went up.I’m reluctant to even speculate at all the different methods there could be for building infrastructure. My imagination can’t possibly compete with the creativity and innovations of millions of people out there in the free market.
No doubt the free market can provide roads and other transportation services better than government, just as it can provide for everything else. And implementing a private-based road system would be fairly simple if that’s the direction we had gone 100 years ago.But I’m interested in a particular practical method of transitioning. How would we transition from the current public road system to a private system?Here are the dilemmas. If the current roads were simply sold to the highest bidder, getting from point A to point B might only have one choice, which creates a new monopoly taking the place of the old one. If we started out with private roads, this wouldn’t be a problem as infrastructure would have likely been built up in such a way that invited competition. But you can’t likely tear down a mile’s worth of buildings to build a road next to another one just to provide competition.Or you could give everyone ownership of the road that sat adjacent to their property. In residential areas, homeowners would likely co-op so that everyone could use their piece of the road in exchange for being able to use all the other pieces of the road. But there exists the potential of one roadowner holding out, deciding that he doesn’t want to allow anyone to pass. Maybe he’s just a jerk that way. And if he owns the road that is at the entrance of a cul-de-sac, his neighbors are now trapped unless they commit trespass. Another situation that would likely not exist had we started with private roads from the get-go.I would love to see private roads, but I’m curious about suggestions on how to transition what we have now into a government-less environment with regards to roads.
Thank you for the comments. Good points both of you.@Nick: In cases where a single road is the only means of travel from point A to point B, an owner of the road could not restrict travel entirely without being guilty of kidnapping, wrongful imprisonment, etc. Preventing someone’s movement because they can’t afford to pay a toll is unreasonably restrictive as well — it is tantamount to bail being set too high — and I believe that a jury would agree. In these exceptional cases (and I would think they would be exceedingly rare), the road owner’s right to property and his right to be free from trespassers is trumped by the traveler’s right to move freely in the conduct of his daily life and business.
Where does the “right to move freely in the conduct of his daily life and business” come from?Here’s the problem with your explanation. All rights are derived from property rights. Saying that the road owner’s right to his property is trumped by someone else’s rights is a contradiction. Rights by definition do not conflict.I support private roads even without knowing the specifics of how they would function, because I understand that no one can name precisely how they would. This would be the same as trying to understand how the commercial airline business would function at first observing the Wright Brothers’ initial flight. No one could have predicted that.I’m only interested in pursuing possibilities for my own curiosity. But one that suggests that one’s right trump the rights of another simply won’t do.
The right to freely travel is well-established. I didn’t think that it needed explanation.I wouldn’t say that rights do not conflict. My right to use the east-west thoroughfare and your right to use the north-south thoroughfare do conflict if we try to exercise them simultaneously. Your right to be as loud as you want on your property could potentially conflict with my right to peace and quiet on mine.And rights do frequently trump one another. For example, your right to privacy, and to be free from searches and seizures, can be trumped by another’s right to property if there is probable cause that you possess evidence of a crime.
The “right to freely travel” is a constitutional privilege, which is something that does not exist in an anarcho-capitalist society. A right to travel without presupposing ownership of the property on which to be traveled is an implication of a right to trespass, a complete distortion of the concepts of “rights.”Me being loud on my property and you wanting peace and quiet on yours is not an example of one right trumping another, it is an example of exercising a right that does not exist. This is the same as saying that your right to not be hit in the face trumps my right to swing my fists around in the air, when in fact I have no such right to begin with if my fists are to come into contact with your face, so there is no right being trumped and no conflict of rights.Ayn Rand explains it well:http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/individualrights.html
Since you’re referencing Rand, I will quote from that link: “the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action” — if traveling in order to sustain one’s life is not a right, how do you reconcile that?
With the qualifying statement from the third paragraph of that same page:”As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.”Without that qualifying statement, one could argue that universal health care, free education, and in fact free housing and food could all be considered “rights”, as these things are generally needed in order to sustain one’s life. As you can see, all of these would imply obligations on everyone else; to provide health care, education, housing, and food.In the US, it’s generally understood that we have a right to travel as there exists publicly-owned land. The constitutional interpretation here is that government must permit anyone to travel on publicly-owned land. But if we’re talking about an anarcho-capitalist society, individuals do not have constitutional privileges. We have natural rights, which start out with the right to life and the right to property, and expand out from there. That being the case, my right to travel would be limited either to my own property, or to the property of others that permit my travel (otherwise it’s trespass).If when we started this country 200+ years ago before there were roads, and individuals were allowed to create private roads and determine who has access, this wouldn’t be an issue. Any road that charged too much or provided too little service would be beat out by a competitor that could just as easily build a parallel road. In the case of many interstates, this is still the case, especially out west where there is plenty of open land.But let’s take an urban or suburban area for instance. There are many roads winding through existing structures where parallel roads would be impossible. The owner of the road would then have a monopoly.I envision it thusly. In neighborhood areas, the government transfers ownership of the roads to the property owners in the neighborhood, where each owner owns a stock in the road structured similar to the way shares are held in a corporation. At the time of transfer, a deed restriction is placed on the road indicating that owners of property adjacent to the road (i.e. homeowners) will have perpetual unrestricted use of the road. This way, no homeowner will ever be blocked out of access to their home by the other shareholders of the road. They will be responsible for the costs of maintaining the road, the way HOA roads are privately maintained (and they are always more attractive than city roads for some reason).In commercial areas, such as shopping centers, the process can work the same way. These businesses will pay for and maintain the roads, and probably allow free passage on the roads because they want their customers to have easy access to their place of business.For highways in between cities, where no property owner (like a business) would have a vested interest in allow free access to the roads, this is where electronic tolls would come in handy. Or for those that travel frequently, maybe a discounted rate could be provided to them if they purchase an annual pass. Additionally, shipping companies that use these roads frequently, like UPS, FedEx, DHL, or any number of the trucking companies may purchase these roads because they may find that it’s more economical to own the roads than it is to pay for access, allowing them to charge a very nominal fee to the public for using the roads as this would simply be superfluous revenue (if there is such a thing).This is my view of the transition from government roads, though I’m always looking to refine it so that no rights are violated (such as trespass), and so that it makes the most practical sense that no one is forced to trespass if they want to leave their own property.
I think we’re in violent agreement here. My vision is similar. The only place where we differ is your view of so-called “monopoly” roads. I still contend that they don’t exist because you cannot force someone to stay on their property for the rest of their life simply because you own the only road in and out. That’s absurd.Do you really believe that a jury presented with such a trespassing case would find in favor of the road owner?
I posted a response a couple of days ago, which said it was waiting for moderator approval before going live. Just didn’t want you to think that I had abandoned the discussion.
Hmmm. I don’t have any pending comments, and I don’t think I got an email.
I basically provided a bit of an explanation on how I thought juries would respond in the scenario you presented, and then mentioned I was in the process of writing a series of articles of how to transition so-called “public goods” to the private sector. I posted a set of URLs to the articles, which is what I believe set off you filter.
Why does somebody have to own the roads?I hear this debate all the time, and it always melts down to extreme, and unlikely examples of possible abuse, or the old “the market will take care of it” argument.But what would happen if nobody owned the roads. If during the transition to our new form of government (or lack of it), we simply made it impossible to own the roads that currently exist?We would still be able to get together and have them repaired. Who would stop us?Most of us would be willing to help pay the costs, or donate our time to keep the roads clear and repaired. So, why bother trying to work out some complicated legal agreement amongst the property owners of a community? Isn’t that what we’re trying to get away from? You don’t have to have a rule or a contract to cover every aspect of life.I think that is one of the things that bugs me about the anarchism argument. I have this vision of needing a few full sized filing cabinets to store all the contracts I would need to live a normal life. I hate contracts.I think the free market will find a solution to the roads problem, and it will be that nobody owns them (at least I hope so)
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